Wednesday, August 20, 2008

A study has shown that teenagers who cut themselves are more likely to engage in stupid, self-destructive behavior. If you noticed how that sentence was tautological then congratulations, you're more intelligent than the Bradley Hasbro Children's Research Laboratory, who needed a bunch of questionnaires and a hundred teenagers to it out.

"Although evidence suggesting a relationship between self-harm and sexual risk behaviors has been identified, little is known regarding the relationship between frequency of self-cutting and sexual risk."

Translation: "The link between idiots cutting themselves and doing other stupid attention-seeking shit is already known. However, no-one has spent time making a nice graph about exactly how many times they cut themselves, so we're good for papers this year."

Imagine someone spending a year testing if different colors of wheel roll differently, then remove the basically useful mechanical system.

Sexual harassment is always is always an extremely negative thing, but this once we must hope that at least one researcher took advantage of having access to a hundred sexually active teenagers with low self-esteem. Because otherwise this was an absolute waste of everyone's time.

Likely Errors: Listening to a bunch of overprivileged whining emo wastes was a definite mistake. After being carefully listened to by (allegedly) real scientists, with clipboards and everything, the illusion that their problems are real and important will take years of extra unemployment and being ignored to shake.

What they could have done with the money: When you're dealing with teens who cut themselves, there are all kinds of options: sending them to work on a farm, locking them in a soundproof container for a few months, hiring professionals to smack them upside the head every time they whine, the options are endless - though we at the institute are tending towards saving time by hiring a cement mixer, filling it with broken glass and throwing them in. Then using a sieve and touring the local soup kitchens.